Lead or Rumour info -Awesome article talking about empty Liverpool

28DL Resident Pickle

This artical was released a few months back by an amazing local blog called Seven Streets. It makes for very interesting reading:

Have a guess how much empty space there is in Liverpool? No, really, have a guess - because no-one really knows. Nor does anyone know what to do about it. David Lloyd gets empty headed.

Somewhere deep in New Mexico, a desert full of hollows forms the Very Large Array telescope. Acres of discrete dishes. Insignificant alone. Game changing together. Working as one, the dishes can do something exponentially massive: map out the emptiness. Make sense of it.

Itâ€™s joined up thinking like this that edges us closer to the important questions â€“ like, where the hell is all that dark matter? And what are we supposed to do about it?

Meanwhile, back in Liverpool weâ€™re surrounded by the stuff. Imagine what weâ€™d find if we embarked on a little joined up thinking of our own.

A few months ago, I started to wonder about empty spaces in the city, and of whether SevenStreets could hold an event in one of them. Within half an hour, a nice chap at the council suggested a few sites â€“ probably about half a million square foot of them. Off the top of his head.

Nested within our city, hidden behind listed buildings, pedimented windows and stone mullions, just inches away from the lunchtime sandwich rush, there is a

Complete

Empty

City

â€œHow many empty buildings are there, do you think?â€ we asked, our curiosity piqued.

No one seemed to know. Why would they? The council knows of its own empty spaces, individual developers and owners of theirs.

No-one has ever surveyed the complete shrinking city. We need to get Werner Hertzog and a laser scanner to map out the caverns and hollows, and make a complete 3D map of Liverpoolâ€™s empty belly.

In the meantime, forget about the Albert Hall. No-one knows how many holes it takes to fill up those grand, ghostly banking halls, fruit exchanges and typistsâ€™ pools.

While we wait, hereâ€™s an incomplete list of empty spaces: buildings either wholly empty or with upwards of 4,000 square feet lying fallow, waiting for the day when new seeds will be sewn. Some have plans. Most donâ€™t. Itâ€™s a long list. You might want to break it up into bite-sized chunks.

28DL Full Member

Tinlings Building - that's now being converted into student flats with a roof extension

Watson Building - that's had several applications through relating to converting it to mixed use with an extension replacing Rapid's old building next to it ; Merepark are still busy with Lewis's and CV so it might be a while before anything happens

West Africa House - recently approved was "to change use of basement/ground and mezzanine levels from sui generis use to A3 (restaurant/cafe) A4 (bar) and ancillary D2 (events space) use"

Littlewoods Building, Edge Lane:

"Littlewoods Site Edge Lane Liverpool L7 : To alter and convert former storage facility for various uses retail, business, hotel and institutional..."

"Littlewoods Site Edge Lane Liverpool L13 : To alter and convert former Littlewood's buildings as a mixed used scheme including hotel, offices and business units and a range of ancillary uses..."

Both approved recently. The storage facility is the square building behind it afaik,and it's all in L7.

Union House, Victoria Street - last year a scheme for a hotel conversion was approved,nothing doing so far though...

Produce and Fruit Exchange, Victoria Street - whether this is indicative of anything in the works IDK,but it was cleaned and all the weeds removed last year

Yep,one for example is the Rocket Estate which is closing down to be turned into a housing estate. Mostly crappy warehouses,but there are two more interesting older buildings. One on the left as you go in,still in use,and one by the railway station which looks totally derelict.